Herbert L. Sussman

SOURCE: "Introduction," in Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968, pp. 1-12.

In the essay that follows, Sussman examines the machine as a prominent symbol in Victorian literature, addressing various critiques and celebrations of technology in works by such authors as Carlyle, Wordsworth, Mill, and Kipling.

When the eight locomotives, drawing six hundred persons, including the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel, and the ill-fated Mr. Huskisson, puffed down the tracks at the public opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, high fences were erected, constables and soldiers called out "to keep off the pressure of the multitude, and prevent them from falling over in their eagerness to witness the opening ceremony."1 Earlier technology had aroused no such general enthusiasm; for all their usefulness, the canal, the macadam road, the stagecoach were only refined versions of techniques...